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The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and
Ethnicity in Pakistan
Oskar Verkaaik
'PIA' stands for Pakistan International Airlines, but not according to manyMuhajirs.
The term Muhajir is widely used in Pakistan for those whose families migrated from
India in the years after independence in 1947. Most of them live in the two big cities of
Karachi and Hyderabad in the southern province of Sindh. Since the 1980s, they
massively support a political party called the MQM (Muhajir Qaumi Movement:
Muhajir National/Ethnic Movement) that has given shape to a collective and political
Muhajir identity. In 1996 and 1997 I did fieldwork in one particular Muhajir
neighborhood in Hyderabad1[1] - an area of shoemakers, blacksmiths, shopkeepers,
street vendors, banglemakers, rickshaw drivers, and their families. In this area, most
people would say that the official meaning of PIA is merely a promising veil of national
solidarity which conceals a rather disgusting face of ethnic exclusivism. The real but
hidden meaning of PIA, they say, is Punjabi International Airlines.
PIA offers its white collar employees safety of employment, good educational
facilities, excellent medical care, housing in quiet, clean, and safe enclaves separated
from the dusty and often dangerous city areas which surround them, cheap possibilities
for foreign travel, and high social status. Apart from the army, the PIA may be the most
attractive state-owned employer in Pakistan. But many of my Muhajir acquaintances
say that they would never a stand a chance if they would apply for a position in the PIA.
That, they insist, has nothing to do with merit. On the contrary, they maintain that
Muhajirs are well-known to be the most educated and patriotic people of Pakistan. Yet
the PIA has been captured by Punjabis and Punjabis will never allow a stranger to enter
their stronghold.
This is typical, they say, for the way Punjabis control all state institutions. The way
they do this is through family ties. A typical Punjabi extended family consists of
brothers, cousins, and uncles, who among themselves divide the strategically important
posts. One is sent into the army, another develops a network among bureaucrats, a third
1[1]
This study was part of a dissertation project which has resulted in a dissertation entitled 'Inside the
Citadel: Fun, Violence, and Religious Nationalism in Hyderabad, Pakistan'. The research has been
financed by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) and was
carried out at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR).
takes care of the landed property, a fourth does the dirty work in the Punjabi Muslim
League, a fifth works himself up into the rank and file of the rival Pakistan People's
Party, a sixth may become a judge, a seventh starts a family branch in the US, an eight
joins the PIA, etc. If one branch suffers, the others make up for the losses. As a whole,
the Punjabi family prospers.
When my informers talk like this, it is not always clear what they mean by 'the
Punjabi family'. Do they allude to several families who happen to be Punjabi? Or do
they talk about all Pakistani Punjabis who live like one extended family? The question
appears irrelevant to them. What matters is that Punjabis arrange things according to
the wrong sense of loyalty. The Pakistani state, after all, is a creation for all South Asian
Muslims. Its fruits belong to all Pakistani citizens. Muhajirs too have the right to a share
of the profits of the PIA. Any true Muslim would recognize that. Yet Punjabis, like
Westerners - sorry, my friend, don't take it personally - only care about money. They
would sell Pakistan, a state created in the name of Islam, to American capitalists. Such
an unpatriotic attitude is in their blood. Did they not form the backbone of the
British-colonial army? A typical Punjabi would even sell his own mother if it would
benefit his interests. Small wonder, then, that Pakistan is in such a sorry state today,
captured as it is by unpatriotic hypocrites who only use Islam for their own purposes.
I have to admit that I have not quoted anyone in particular in this introduction. It is
rather a loose compilation of many casual conversations. Perhaps none of my informers
would endorse this view entirely - certainly not when it would be presented to them by
a foreigner or on paper. Yet the text contains a basic idea that I have often heard in
Hyderabad, namely that the Pakistani state is made in the name of Islam and belongs to
the whole of the Pakistani nation, but is captured by one ethnic group. This chapter is
meant to examine more fully this interrelatedness between Islam, ethnicity, and images
of the state in popular discourse among Muhajir residents of Hyderabad and Karachi.
To do this, I want to relate Dale Eickelman's & James Piscatori's remarks on the
character of Muslim politics to an approach for studying the state as proposed by Philip
Abrams and put to practice by Akhil Gupta in the case of South Asia. The aim is to
show how people in Pakistan can talk about the state. I will argue that the modern
nation-state is collectively imagined as a space of legitimate power, relatively
unconnected to and untouched by real power struggles that are going on within society,
and that this is done by depicting the state as an expression, or even the guardian, of true
Islamic principles of loyalty and authority. State functionaries, government leaders, and
others associated with the process of nation-building and state formation in Pakistan
have promoted an image of the state as being opposed to, and aimed to reform,
prevailing 'unislamic' tendencies within society, such as ethnic or kinship loyalty and
'feudalism'. At present, societal groups and emancipatory movements appropriate and
use this discourse for their own purposes. Continuing to reify the ideal of the state as the
potential promotor of a just society, they also accuse the elites associated with state
power of polluting this ideal by using it as a veil to conceal the very particularistic
loyalties the state is supposed to reform. This has added to an increasing crisis of state
authority as for instance indicated by extremely low turn-outs during national elections,
a growing sense of displacement among certain societal groups, as well as a growing
polarization within Pakistani society as for instance manifested in the rise of ethnic and
sectarian movements. I will end with some remarks on why the widely held assumption
that the rise of social unrest and social/political violence is caused by a collapse of state
authority is too simplistic as it focuses solely on changes that occur within state
institutions and ignores possibly more important transformations in society at large.
Muslim politics and the reification of the state
To a large extent the contention of Eickelman & Piscatori that Islam constitutes the
moral-symbolic language of Muslim politics is also true for Pakistan. Eickelman &
Piscatori argue that most political debating, bargaining, anc cajoling in Muslim
societies contain explicit references or more implicit allusions to Islamic notions of
loyalty, authority, respect, justice, solidarity, etc. Of course, despite claims to the
contrary, Islam leaves much room for disagreement over such issues. In modern
societies, Islam may serve many goals and objectives as no person or institution enjoys
the monopoly on the interpretation of Islamic traditions. As is for instance clear in the
case of women movements, however, it is practically impossible, or at least unwise, to
reject Islam altogether as a common ground for social-political discourse (Eickelman &
Piscatori 1996).
Apart from, and in addition to, Islam, the state constitutes another legitimizing
principle in the name of which people claim to say or do things. It is probably true that
for a long time states were built and maintained in the name of something else, like the
monarch, the emperor, a religion; all the same, the idea that the state itself constitutes an
autonomous principle of authority seems to be at least several centuries old. This idea is
based on what Philip Abrams calls the reification of the state into an almost sacred
entity in the name of which order must be restored or people can be asked to make
sacrifices - an idea of order which to a large extent helps shape people's perception of
social reality. Since Abrams himself formulates what he has in mind more accurately
than I can, it is best to quote him somewhat extensively:
[T]he state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice.
It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.... There
is a state-system...: a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure
centred in government and more or less extensive, unified and dominant in any
given society.... There is, too, a state-idea, projected, purveyed and variously
believed in in different societies at different times.... The state comes into being
as a structuration within political practice; it starts its life as an implicit
construct; it is then reified... and acquires an overt symbolic identity
progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice. The
ideological function is extended to a point where conservatives and radicals
alike believe that their practice is not directed at each other but at the state; the
world of illusion prevails. The task of the sociologist is to demystify; and in this
context that means attending to the senses in which the state does not exist
rather than to those in which it does (Abrams 1988: 82).
It is of some importance to see that the reification of the state can only be reached
by separating the state from society, and that this separation is a discursive or imaginary
practice. Concretely, state functionaries are seldomly, if ever, not part of society. They
may belong to a particular ethnic community, an income group, they are men or women,
etc; yet, they derive their power from the negation of their social identities and the
claim that they, as state functionaries, stand outside or above society, act impartially
and are not directed by any prejudice or self-interest. It is therefore important to study
how this idea of impartiality and authority is being constructed and reproduced by
people associated with state power. This includes the study of the symbolism of state
rituals and processions, state monuments, military uniforms, bureaucratic new speech,
etc.
Building upon these insights, Akhil Gupta has shown that popular images of the
state hinge on the same separation of the state from society. In an article on popular
debates about state corruption in a northern Indian village, Gupta argues that the very
theme of corruption enables the villagers to maintain a division between themselves
and local state representatives. While state functionaries enter local power struggles,
they also deny this by claiming to act in the name of an impartial and translocal state.
Not surprisingly, the villagers evaluate this discrepancy as hypocrisy or corruption. The
villagers thus subscribe to the ideal of an impartial and translocal state and then
condemn the activities of local state functionaries on the basis of these high
expectations. While the ideal of an impartial state is maintained, the state as it is
experienced locally, in contrast, is talked about as a pool of moral decay that pervades
the state but has little effect on society. The separation between state and society is thus
maintained in order to confront the power abuse of local state functionaries with the
moral superiority the villagers ascribe to themselves. The idea of a state that exists
relatively independently of society may thus become the basis for rebellion, resistance,
or other forms of subversive action (Gupta 1995).
In the case Gupta describes, the theme of corruption is the most important
argument through which the villagers construct the image of a polluted state, or a
besieged ideal of impartiality and justice. Although corruption serves a similar goal in
Pakistan, I also think that Muhajirs in Hyderabad have more strategies at their disposal
to make a similar argument about a besieged and conquered state. Ethnicity - or the
argument that other ethnic groups have captured the state - is one of them. Apart from
corruption and ethnicity I will also pay attention to a discourse revolving around secret
intelligence agencies. Seen as the hidden, true power players operating behind the
bureaucratic facade of the democratic state, intelligence agencies are said to corrupt the
original ideals of the Pakistan Movement. I will furthermore discuss the presence of
rumors and the production of a quasi-secret atmosphere in which to distribute such
rumors which help construct the image of the captive state.
In this article, then, I will be most concerned with the myth of the state rather than
with the doings of the state. Rather than focusing on the production of the state myth by
state officials themselves - an issue someone like Timothy Mitchell (1991) has paid
attention to - I will in this contribution limit myself mainly to the popular appropriation
of this myth as it linked to the themes of corruption, ethnicity and the works of
intelligence agencies, all of which are 'hot issues' in popular debates in Pakistan today.
To put these popular images of the state into perspective, however, I will first say a few
things about state formation in Pakistan and how the idea of state authority has been
linked to a modernist interpretation of Islam.
Islam and nationalism in Pakistan
State formation in Pakistan, as nation-building, is closely related to modernist trends in
the interpretation of Islam as they were being developed throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth century. Perhaps more than anybody else, the poet-philosopher
Muhammad Iqbal has linked Islamic modernization to Pakistani Muslim nationalism.
His ideas have been very influential in Pakistan, so much so that he is generally
considered the national thinker of Pakistan. The most prestigious university of the
country is named after him and his grave in Lahore, located next the Badshahi Mosque
and other monuments of the Moghul empire, has become a place of secular pilgrimage
for many Pakistani citizens. Iqbal argued that the future of an independent Muslim state
in South Asia would rise or fall depending on the extent in which South Asian Muslims
would be able to modernize Islam and free themselves from what he took as erroneous
innovations and regional pre-Islamic traditions that had come to pervert the original
revelations of the Prophet. The new state of Pakistan was thus not simply based on
Islam, or the ideal of Muslim unity, but, more precisely, on a particular interpretation of
Islam which stressed the importance of modern education leading to an individual
Bildung into modern citizens and the ability to independent reasoning concerning
religious matters (ijtehad). In nationalist ideology, particular practices were rejected as
being traditional, backward, syncretic, a remainder of Hindu or colonial influence, and
therefore un- or not-quite-Islamic.
Three sets of practices and mentalities were especially considered unworthy of a
modern Pakistani citizen. The one that has been given most attention in academic
writing is popular Sufism, and especially saint-worship, which is dismissed by many
Pakistani as either a sign of backward mentality or an Hindu perversion (e.g. Ewing
1983 & 1997, Gilmartin 1988, Werbner & Basu 1998). Two others have been less
noticed thus far. 'Feudalism' has been identified as being in contradiction with the
Islamic ideal of social equality (musawat). In Pakistan today, words for different types
of landlords, such as jagirdar, zamindar, and especially wadera, are widely used as
insults in public conversation. In speeches, politicians accuse each other of wishing to
rule Pakistan as 'their private jagir' (landed property). In TV series, the wadera persona
is almost by definition the evil genius. This rather recent type of landlord who cannot
flaunt an aristocratic background as he is mostly from a family who used to produce the
village headman who worked as the representative of the more traditional jagirdar or
zamindar, is typically portrayed as driving around his vast lands in a four wheel drive
Pajero jeep with tinted windows, exploiting his bonded laborers (haris), raping their
daughters and sons, drinking whiskey, and terrorising the countryside with the help of a
private army of armed strongmen (dacoits). This talk probably has its roots in the power
struggle that has been going on in Pakistan between the city-based bureaucracy and
military, and on the other hand regional elites of landlords (Jalal 1995).
Further, several forms of exclusivist solidarity which may divide the Muslim
community have become under attack as being unislamic. This is most profoundly the
case with the concept of caste (zat) which is widely condemned as being part of a
brahmin ideology. As a result, many Pakistani have dropped their indigenous family
names, most of which refer to a caste-specific occupation, such as mochi (cobbler) or
qasai (butcher), and have adopted a so-called ashraf (noble) name with an origin in
Islamic territories such as Arabia, Persia or Central Asia. To a lesser extent, kinship
solidarity, as in so-called biradaris (endagamous groups), can be condemned as being
in violation of the ideal of Muslim unity, as symbolized by the hajj, as well as the hijra,
the exodus which marks the leaving behind of tribal ties in favor of a new religious
community. Finally, regional solidarities, commonly labelled 'ethnic', are often said to
endanger the all Muslim unity.
In the early decades of Pakistan independence, cultural and political elites depicted
the state as a major initiator of social and cultural reform - literally as a set of parents
(ma-bap) educating their children (Ahmad 1964: 103-120). Modernization was seen as
a liberating gift presented by a social avant-garde to a backward society steeped in
tradition. Modernization was a mixture of, on the one hand, a mimicry of things
Western, including ideas of military discipline and economic development, a
bureaucratic style of clothing, a knowledge of British philosophy and poetry - at a
minimum, one was expected to be able to quote from Russell and Wordsworth - and on
the other hand a training in a sharif or noble, mostly urban culture, centered around the
Urdu language as it had been developed in the nineteenth century in northern India.
Condemning saint-worship, 'feudalism', and particularistic loyalties as traditional and
unislamic, members of urban elites tried to compete with established regional and rural
political networks centered around powerful landlords and spiritual leaders. The effort
to make the state of Pakistan prosper, as well as the attempt to purify Islam from Hindu
and colonial influences, were their claims to legitimacy.
From the late 1960s onwards, a counter-discourse emerged which developed and
promoted regional or 'ethnic' identities. With some exceptions, regionalists have not
rejected the idea of Muslim nationalism as such, but have tried to give a new meaning
to the concept through a much more positive evaluation of regional syncretic Islamic
traditions. Especially Sufism or tasawwuf, as the mystical, less shari'at-oriented branch
of Islam, has been reevaluated as a form of Islam that is more at home in the various
provinces of Pakistan than the reformist notions of the urban modernist elite. There has
been more attention for ecstatic practices, as well as for more physical expressions of
faith - music, dancing, crying - which in the 1960s and 1970s especially attracted the
urban, vaguely left-wing youth of students, intellectuals, artists, etc, who found in these
passionate and swinging practices of devotion more opportunities for social rebellion,
fun, and identity construction than in the modernist emphasis on the importance of
reason ('aql) and discipline (nazm). In the province of Sindh - which together with
formerly East-Pakistan became the most rebellious province in the late 1960s - the
shrines of two local saints, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Shah Abdul Latif, became
important centers of regional resistance and the construction of a separate Sindhi
religious and political identity.
The rediscovery of syncretic traditions and 'Sufism' was taken up by the Pakistan
People's Party, which in 1970 won the first democratic elections in the history of
Pakistan. During the administration of the PPP, ethnic or regional identities were
promoted as intrinsically part of the complex identity of a Pakistani citizen. Whereas a
Pakistani identity had always had a national and religious component, an ethnic one
was now added to it. Four ethnic groups were more or less officially recognized and
they coincided with provincial boundaries, so that a Pakistani was required to identify
as either Punjabi, Sindhi, Pakhtun or Baluchi. Moreover, a quota system, which
distributed positions in the civil service as well as places in educational institutions on
the basis of ethnic background, allotted certain rights to members of these various
ethnic groups.
Partly in this context, young Muhajirs in Karachi and Hyderabad mobilized
themselves on the basis of a new Muhajir identity from the late 1970s onwards. They
became the most vocal of those groups which have not been willing to identify which
one of the four recognized ethnic groups. In 1978, the All Pakistan Muhajir Student
Organization (APMSO) was formed, followed in 1984 by the Muhajir Qaumi
Movement (MQM). The MQM has since then made headlines in both the Pakistani and
international press as it has been a major player in the dramatic increase of ethnic
polarization and violence in urban Sindh. It is a movement with many different faces.
From an academic standpoint, it is movement of remarkable social mobilization based
on a rare perception of ethnicty as the MQM does not claim a separate ethnic identity
for Muhajirs on the basis of a shared homeland but rather on the basis of a shared
experience in exodus and migration. For many of its supporters, the MQM is a
revolutionary movement which has given voice to large sections of the underprivileged
population of Karachi and Hyderabad. Its critics associate the party mainly with armed
terror, ethnic discrimination, nepotism and crime. The party, which has won elections
in urban Sindh with large margins since 1987, has seriously suffered from an internal
split in 1991, and even more from attempts of various governments to break the back of
the party's street power in a series of so-called Operations Clean-up, which have been
criticized by human rights commissions for the extrajudicial methods which were
reportingly being employed.
Corruption and violence
In the neighborhood where I did fieldwork, the experiences people have with state
functionaries clearly do not meet their expectations. Expectations are based on the ideal
of an impartial, transparant, autonomous state, which, as a benevolent and just parent,
rules over society. That is the norm - the way things should be. In practice, however,
that ideal is felt to be constantly corrupted by dishonest and insincere state functionaries
with which the people of the neighborhood have to deal daily. As Gupta also observes
in his northern Indian village, there is a profound discrepancy between expectations of
the state and everyday experiences with local state functionaries, a discrepancy which
serves as the basis of a discourse of popular protest and resistance.
Most residents of my neighborhood - all of them are Muhajirs - subscribe to the
legitimacy of state authority. In this respect, they consider themselves different from,
for instance, the Pathans in the mountainous North, who, as a tribal people, are said to
be an unruly, unpredictable lot who do not recognize the authority of the state.
Notwithstanding the fact that Pathans are to some extent admired for their proverbial
sense of independence, they are also condemned for their tribal laws, and especially the
custom of blood feud, which are seen as evidence of an unislamic and backward
mentality and a violation of both the shari'at and the constitution. Very often the
discourse of modernity is being used in this respect: the tribal laws are said to belong to
a past which educated people have left behind. These traditional laws, based on
exclusivist loyalties of tribe and family, should now be replaced by the impartiality of
the shari'at and the bureaucratic laws of the modern nation-state. Moreover, as
Muhajirs, who claim to have left their homelands in India for the ideal of Pakistan, the
residents of the neighborhood feel that they have profoundly contributed to the
establishment of Pakistan, which was expected to make real the ideals of Muslim
unity and social equality and put an end to particularistic solidarities and traditional law
systems. Generally speaking, the residents identify the state as an agent of modernity
and reform and hold that Muhajirs - as an educated people and a people who went
through the chastening, if not purifying, experience of exodus - are especially equipped
to understand and promote the ideals of Islam and modernity. Their everyday talk is full
of condemnations of the identified antipoles of modernity, not only tribal laws, but also
'Sufism', 'feudalism', and caste and kinship loyalties.
Although always softened by an ideology of Muslim unity and national solidarity,
the idea that Muhajirs are the champions, if not the chosen people, of Pakistan regularly
pops up and it most often comes with a feeling of solitude and displacement, of having
been betrayed and left in the cold by the other peoples of Pakistan who have bartered
away the ideals of Pakistan for their regional or ethnic interests. The personal
experience of migration and the stories which are told about this within the family and
the neighborhood have always been linked to the national experience of independence
and, subsequently, the building up from scratch of Pakistan. The sacrifices, which are
said to have been made by Muhajirs, have never been properly appreciated. On the
contrary, the state, once established, has been conquered and barricaded by others who
are less receptive of the liberating ideals of Islamic modernism.
With such arguments, people in the neighborhood evaluate and talk about their
daily dealings with local state officials. Very few of them work in state institutions,
although some work as policemen or other low-grade civil servants, and most of them
look at state institutions as impenetrable bastions. It is generally considered a waste of
time and energy to apply for a job in the civil service unless you are willing and able to
pay a bribe as high as approximately one year's salary. Further, the implementation of
governmental development schemes - legalization of illegal housing, construction of
sewerage systems, etc - depends on personal contacts or high bribes and takes a
frustratingly long time. The police in particular is considered untrustworthy, hostile and
humiliating. When in trouble, stay away from the police if you do not want more
problems. Nevertheless, it is not always possible to avoid the police, which regularly
set up check-points to relieve passers-by of their money and valuables.
Over the past few years, corruption has become a major theme in political debates not only on a popular level, but also in newspapers, on TV and in the national assembly.
Prime ministers are usually dismissed on the charge of corruption: Muhammad Khan
Junejo in 1988, Benazir Bhutto in 1990 and 1996, Nawaz Sharif in 1993 and 1999. In
November 1996, after Bhutto had been dismissed, a major operation was launched by
the interim government to overcome corruption. With great fanfare, an Accountability
(Ehtasab) Commission was installed which would check the bank accounts of every
major politician and bureaucrat on corruption. During the same period, Pakistan
appeared as second-best on some international list of most corrupt countries, which
became a popular topic of public debates and jokes. Some said that it was to be
Pakistan's tragic faith never to be the first in anything, while others countered that
Pakistan had initially been on the top of the list, but then some government official had
bribed the makers of the list to persuade them to put some African state first.
Meanwhile, the national television network daily reported on the findings of the
Ehtasab Commission, showing the Ehtasab Commissioner behind a huge account of
documents piled up on his desk, or solemnly talking with the President of high court
judges against the background of high-rank uniformed soldiers. It created the illusion
that the corruption and nepotism were not an intrinsic part of state power but, on the
contrary, a foreign, if contagious and dangerous, disease that had affected many a state
body and which was now being fought with all the power the state could muster.
Interestingly, the Ehtasab Commission itself has since then become subject of
controversy and allegations of political intriguing, but although this has affected the
accountability of yet another state institution, it has hardly damaged the belief in the
possibility of a transparent and impartial state as such. It has, however, seriously added
to a general public distrust in politicians and bureaucrats, who are commonly believed
to 'eat your brain' (dimag khana) with hollow phrases of Islam and national solidarity
while ruthlessly exploiting the common or poor people (am log, gharib log).
The popular perception of the state is not only shaped by corruption, but also by
violence and humiliation. According to the neighborhood residents, state violence has
become salient and more brutal since the 1970s. This includes everyday instances of
harassment by the police, but also more violent state persecution of potential militants
of the MQM. Backed by massive propaganda which depicts the series of Operations
Clean-up as battles against 'terrorists' funded by foreign enemies such as India, state
forces have killed a large number of MQM militants in what the press commonly
defines as 'police encounters'. At times, the army has proudly, almost as a trophy,
published the monthly number of dacoits (bandits) it had shot dead. Several
newspapers and magazines have published critical stories about these practices together
with pictures of maimed bodies. Further, the youth of the neighborhood tells each other
stories about peers who have been arrested and put in jail, where they are reportingly
raped, urinated upon, made to squat for prolonged periods of time and otherwise
humiliated.
Despite these experiences and rumors, the people in the neighborhood have not lost
their belief in the ideal of a just and impartial state altogether. They have rather found
explanations which ascribe the moral rot to particular groups of people which are said
to corrupt the ideal in a concealed manner according to secret deals and hidden loyalties.
One of these explanations hinges on the presence of intelligence agencies. A second
builds upon the notion of ethnic exclusivism.
Popular explanations of corruption: intelligence agencies and ethnicity
A great deal of political rumor in Hyderabad is about agencies. Intelligence agencies
are believed to be the real rulers of Pakistan, the secret manipulators of politics. They
are believed to be omnipresent and to some extent that even seems true. This was
brought home to me one day when a friend told me that he had been visited by a man
who had identified himself as an agent of the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), the army's
intelligence agency. The man had asked about my doings in Hyderabad. The best way
to get rid of him, my friend suggested, was to casually inform the right persons about
the harmless character of my research. The way to do this was to make a tour around the
city to visit anybody likely to be an ISI informer in order to drink a cup of tea, have a
chat and leave a good impression. It took us a couple of days inside travel agencies,
petrol stations, post offices, tea stalls and restaurants, shrines, offices of lawyers and
NGO's, the Press Club and several shops and workshops in the bazar. Most intriguing
of this limited study was to find out that the identity of intelligence agents was known to,
or at least suspected by, a large number of people. When I returned to the neighborhood
of my fieldwork with the exciting idea that I had qualified information to tell, it
appeared that most informers I had been drinking tea with were already known there.
I do not want to suggest that Pakistan is at par with the state of Rumania prior to the
1989 revolution in which, as Katherine Verdery (1996) describes, an astonishing large
percentage of the population was involved in secret intelligence work, but I am
convinced that intelligence agencies are an established aspect of Pakistani politics and
that the ISI is not the only such agency operating in Pakistan. In fact, several law and
order forces run their own agency and they often appear to be interested in each other as
much as in anybody else. This also means that the state cannot be regarded as a Big
Brother, spying on its subjects through secret activities penetrating private places and
thereby effectively keeping society under its thumb. It rather resembles a troubled,
fragmented family of several brothers who are deeply distrustful of each other and
cannot rely too much on each other in their dealings with the outside world. Partly for
this reason I think that the influence of the intelligence agencies should not be
exaggerated, even though there is little doubt that the ISI in particular is an important
player in Pakistani politics.
Nevertheless, many wild speculations can be heard about their supposedly
far-reaching power. Almost all major political developments are regularly ascribed to
the secret manipulation of 'the agencies' - a category that usually remains unspecified.
Large-scale riots are often believed to be masterminded by 'the agencies'. This also goes
for remarkable electoin results. It is commonly believed that 'the agencies' work for
particular economic, political and military elites which try to defend their 'vested
interests' through a policy of divide and rule. The idea is that the ideals of Pakistan social equality, Muslim unity, the abolition of feudalism, etc - would harm their
position, but since they cannot openly declare their unpatriotic conservatism, they need
secret agencies to spread hatred and distrust among the common people of Pakistan. In
this way, the problems that pester Pakistan - poverty, corruption, ethnic polarization are seen to be the result of the wheelings and dealings of a happy few who are in control
of the secret niches of the Pakistani state, rather than of inequalities in social relations,
as well as ethnic or religious prejudices, which are deeply ingrained in society at large.
Comparatively speaking, this discourse on intelligence agencies is rather
optimistic and less dangerous than the other explanation for state corruption which
revolves around ethnic competition. Compared to the ethnic discourse, arguments
about the prevailing power of intelligence agencies put the blame on an almost invisible
and unidentifiable enemy. According to this talk, different social groups within
Pakistani society would live peacefully together if it were not for the dividing scheming
of unknown intelligence agents. In contrast, the argument of ethnic differences
potentially blames anyone who belongs to the rival ethnic group.
In the introduction of this chapter I have already sketched the contents of the
argument about Punjabi biradari solidarity. Punjabis, however, are not the only ethnic
group which is said to have captured and polluted the state by unpatriotic and unislamic
means. In a slightly different argument, Muhajirs also accuse Sindhis of dominating the
state through traditional and backward forms of loyalty which damage national
solidarity. If Punjabis are condemned for their exclusivist kinship mentality, Sindhis
are considered an inveterately feudal people. The Sindhi way towards domination is
through the vertical networks of feudal patronage headed by either a landlord (wadera)
or a spiritual leader (pir). These rural big men are primarily blamed for the prevailing
'feudalism' that is said to continue to dominate Pakistani politics and that is especially
believed to characterize the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which is led by the Sindhi
landlord family of the Bhuttos. The ordinary Sindhi, however, is not considered to be
free of guilt either. He is said to be of a lazy, unmanly, submissive and superstitious
disposition, which does not befit a modern Pakistani citizen. In a gesture of welcome he
puts his hands before his chest like a Hindu instead of offering a fellow Muslim his
right hand. He bows in front of his master. He begs rather than demands. Some
residents in my neighborhood also said that the Sindhi prefers fish for diner rather
than meat and that this disputable taste symbolizes his fishy, unreliable, deeply 'feudal'
character.
It would be an interesting study to trace dow the genealogy of such ideas. I am not
in the position to do this, but it is clear that negative images of the backward Sindhi
Muslim - the Sindhi Hindu, in contrast, has a reputation of an energetic and efficient
money-lender and trader - were already circulating in northern India during colonial
times. From cities like Delhi, Lucknow and Agra, the Sindh looked like an uncivilized
backwater and an unhealthy wilderness of extreme heat, dangerous animals, strange
diseases, mad mullahs and fanatical faqirs. Such notions were also promoted in colonial
writings. There are many examples of this, but the most well-known is probably Sir
Richard Burton's travel accounts. In an early work, Burton wrote that 'the dark
complexion of the Sindhi points him out an instance of arrested development.... He is
idle and apathetic, unclean in his person, and addicted to toxication; notoriously
cowardly in times of danger, and proportionally insolent when he has nothing to fear;
he has no idea of truth or probity, and only wants more talent to be a model of treachery'
(Burton 1988: 283-4). To be fair, Burton did make an exception for the Sindhi woman.
In a later work, which also contains a chapter entitled The Sindi man - his character,
and especially what he drinks and which was recently reprinted by the Department of
Culture and Tourism of the Government of Sindh, Burton describes the Sindhi woman's
attitude as 'not ungraceful, she carries herself well, she never stoops and, observe, she
has high but not round shoulders' (Burton 1993: 328).
Although informed by older, pre-independence traditions of prejudice, it is clear
that popular images of a state captured by a backward ethnic group to a large extent
follow the discourse of modernity and tradition as it has been promoted by the mostly
urban elites which have considerably shaped the process of state formation and
nation-building in Pakistan. In the popular imagination, we see a similar notion of a
reforming state fighting the evils of traditions, such as feudalism, superstition, or - in
the case of the anti-Punjabi argument - a too exclusivist kinship solidarity. From a
national perspective, such traditional mentalities have always been depicted as the trait
of particular ethnic groups. In the hands of underprivileged social groups, such as the
Muhajir shoemakers and rickshaw drivers in the neighborhood of my fieldwork, such
ideas are appropriated to lay bare the hypocrisy of the privileged strate of society. These
notions feed into a sense of betrayal and displacement so pivotal to present-day Muhajir
identity.
A geography of secret state power
The captive state, then, is seen as the true, but hidden, image of power that is concealed
by empty words about bureaucratic transparancy, Muslim fraternity and self-effacing
patriotism. It is important to realize that the hypocrisy that is considered self-evident
and for everyone to see is at the same time said to take place within a domain of secrecy
that cannot bear the light of day. It is in this sense that the image of the captive state
contributes to the reproduction of a separate Muhajir identity. It is not simply the fact
that corruption, nepotism and abuse of power have rendered talk about the impartiality
of the state meaningless - a development that has been going on for several years and is
now accepted as, indeed, a fact by probably most Pakistani citizens or, for that matter,
most foreign observers. More importantly, such practices are said to talk place in an
atmosphere of secrecy and conspiracy of which the common people (am log) are
excluded. This sense of exclusion from what actually and rightfully belongs to the
nation - a notion that in the hands of Muhajirs has an ethnic as well as a class
component - is an important theme in present-day Muhajir identity.
It is, of course, well-known that secrets, rumors and gossip can be important means
of communication through which to establish a sense of community or loyalty. From
the theoretical works of Simmel (1950) and Goffman (1959) to, for instance, a recent
study of ethnic conflict in South-Senegal (De Jong 2000), we find the notion that
secrets must first be identified as secrets to become secrets at all. Secondly, secrecy
creates a community of people who are 'in the know' as opposed to the ignorant, who
are therefore outsiders. In this way, a secret - regardless of its contents - may become
the glue that binds a group together. But secrecy can also generate insiders and
outsiders in a different way by creating the fiction of a secret syndicate that controls and
penetrates society through covert means. Rumors about freemasonry or a worldwide
Jewish conspiracy are historical examples.
In Hyderabad, secrecy and the communication or rumors worked both ways. On
the one hand, rumors about intelligence agencies or invisible biradari or feudal
networks depicted opponents as scheming conspirators connected through traditional
and less than transparant networks which are anathema to the ideals of a free,
democratic, Muslim nation-state. On the other hand, however, such rumors were
seldomly communicated openly. Although everyone was aware of the existence of such
rumors to the point that they can rightly be called public secrets, most of my informants
took care to contribute to the notion of secrecy by first creating a conspirational
atmosphere before telling me what I had already been told a thousand times. At a
minimum, one would lower one's voice, take me by the arm and look at me
significantly to indicate that the words to come were both valuable and dangerous.
Other people were not content with this and would propose to retreat into unlikely
places such as airconditioned restaurants, which had the additional advantages of
coolness and expensive beverages, to put me in the know. Two places were especially
favored for this purpose. One was a poorly lit restaurant on one of Hyderabad's main
streets, owned by a well-known man, who himself had a reputation of being close to the
secret center of things. He had been a candidate in local elections in the 1970s and had
spent brief periods in jail for his political activities. In those days, the restaurant had
been a meeting place of politically active students. Since his retreat from active politics,
the owner usually sat outside the restaurant, mostly accompanied by one of his former
friends and comrades. Inside, the fans on the ceiling were ramshackle enough to make
plenty of noise so that private conversations could not be overheard.
The other place was a coffee house, equally centrally located and also known as a
place where radical politicians, students, journalists and - also - intelligence agents met.
Like the airconditioned restaurant, it maintained a reputation as a place of rumors and
secret knowledge. Amazingly, then, to exchange secrets, my informants would often
propose to go to places which made one suspected by just being there. These places
served as identified hotbeds of classified information. Being seen there to some extent
made one feel involved in the secret center of local politics. It gave these places, which
would also include certain shrines of Sufi saints, the Press Club compound or students'
hostels, a certain awe. In addition, they were characterized by an anonymity that went
well with the rumors that were being exchanged. They were typically without an author.
They rather came from nowhere in particular but were believed by everybody.
These places, then, formed a geography of power complementary to the prestigious
and often colonial architecture of official state buildings, such as the court buildings,
the head office of the police or the army bungalows in the lush Cantonment area.
Considered the dark workshops of local politics, they were not only seen as places
where conspirators would meet, but also where the secret bodies of the state gathered
information, bribed informants and hired people for illegal activities. If conspiracies
were masterminded within the drawing-rooms of Punjabi biradaris or the residences of
Sindhi feudal lords, they were believed to be carried out in the workshops of covert
state power where one could find the people willing to do the dirty work. On visits to
such places, my informants would never fail to point out to me the men who had been
involved in spying activitivies.
It is not my intention to argue that rumors about covert networks of power and
illegal state activities stem from collective fantasies which have no basis in actual facts.
On the contrary, intelligence agencies do play an important role in Pakistani politics
just as biradari and patronage networks continue to be important. However, the
atmosphere of secrecy in which such activities are discussed makes it possible to
overestimate their influence. Probably the most well-known example of this is the
contention that the army through the illegal and hidden activities of the ISI is
responsible for the rise of the MQM. This is a rumor that has become a widely accepted
fact among the critics of the MQM. The idea is that the military regime in the
mid-1980s needed a popular political party in the province of Sindh to curb the power
of the Pakistan People's Party, the regime's main opponent. While it is possible that the
ISI has had some dealings with the MQM in its early years, it seems rather farfetched to
make the army responsible for the massive popular support the party subsequently
received. The argument contributes to the notion of an omnipresent, all-powerful state
that may produce popular movements wherever it wishes. Such rumors thus reinforce
the notion of a state that is both separated from society as well as capable of
manipulating society totally. Without wishing to belittle the force that state officials can
mobilize through both overt and covert means, it is also clear that the rise of such
popular movements as headed by the MQM are, among other things, forms of protest
against state crime and corruption rather than the planned outcome of state
manipulation. Rumors that make the ISI responsible for the movement, however,
enable one to close one's eyes for the complex changes that are going on in society at
large and that offer much more plausible, if alarming, explanations for ethnic conflict.
Instead, they enable one to interpret the crisis as a crisis of the state alone. By way of
epilogue, I will say a few words about this tendency to explain complex social
transformations solely in terms of a crisis of governability.
Conclusion
A very influential, almost commensensical, theory of the state explains the recent rise
of political violence and social unrest in Pakistan in terms of a 'crisis of governability'
or a 'collapse of state power' (e.g. Nasr 1992). According to a widely held public
opinion, the trouble is caused by a decay of political institutions and an erosion of state
authority. When the state loses its grip on society, the subjects according to an almost
Hobbesian logic will take care of their interests in a chaotic and opportunistic manner.
In Pakistan, it is often recalled that the most violent episodes in the history of Pakistan
occurred during the collapse of an authoritarian military regime, be it at the late 1960s
or the late 1980s. Democratic regimes, it is argued, are weaker and less willing or
capable to maintain law and order through violent means.
I have difficulties with these assumptions. Surely it is difficult to maintain that the
Pakistani state has become a weak state in the 1990s. A large number of heavily armed
military, para-military, and police forces have been brought out into the streets of
Karachi and Hyderabad since the late 1980s. I am not so sure that the transition to
democracy since 1988, an arrested process since the coup of 1999, lowered the
readiness of government leaders to use force against civilians. All the same, it is
possible to argue that the state is increasingly characterized by fragmentation. Various
state institutions are constantly in competition with each other. The most dramatic
expression of this are the violent confrontations between police forces and the military
which took place in a number of incidents (Verkaaik 1999: ch. 7). Much of this is the
result of the fact that new administrations often establish new governmental bodies and
law-and-order forces and man them with known allies, rather than work with, or try to
rearrange, existing institutions manned by civil servants whose loyalty is doubtful. In
this way, social and political rivalry is firmly established within the state apparatus, but
that does in no way imply that these various state institutions are less willing or capable
of using effective force.
Rather than looking at the state as an autonomous, unified and monitoring agency,
then, it appears more fruitful to study the state as a particular part of society that is
characterized by a relatively high degree of political activities, including competition
over resources, exchange of information, ideological debates, and the use of physical
coercion. One should not merely look for causes of this increasing fragmentation of the
state in the state apparatus itself, but rather take it as a reflection of a more far-reaching
transition of society at large. To paraphrase Sandria Freitag, who has made a similar
argument in the case of India, present-day social unrest and political violence are
symptoms of 'a much larger and more challenging process under way: the redefinition
of Pakistani civil social space and who will be allowed to participate publicly inside
that discursive space' (Freitag 1996: 232). In other words, the argument that social
unrest is caused by a collapse of state authority fails to acknowledge two importants
facts. It firstly accepts the idea of a separation between state and society while there is
no evidence that such a strict separation exists outside the domain of the political
imagination. Secondly, it reduces social unrest to a crisis of the state whereas it is an
expression of changes which are taking place in a much larger part of society.
In this article, then, I have tried to initiate a more integrated approach of studying
present-day relations between state and society in Pakistan by looking at the state 'from
below', that is, by examining popular perception of the state within an 'ethnic' group
that has been at the heart of social transitions and political unrest in urban Sindh since
the mid-1980s. Building upon the work of Eickelman & Piscatori, I have argued that
the popular imagination of the state is linked to a modernist concept of Islamic
nationalism so that the state came to be regarded as the leading agent of religious and
social reform. This notion of the state as a benevolent parent was itself based on the
myth of the state as separated from and impartial to society. In turn, this ideal of the
state have become the basis for a popular critique of state practice. Expecting the
impossible, namely a truly transparant and democratic state sincerely devoted to the
ideals of Muslim fraternity, Muhajirs have grown deeply disappointed with and
distrustful of the state, which they feel fails to live up to its own high standards.
Instead of reforming a backward tradition, the state has been captured by social groups
who through secret and invisible means hold on to their particularistic sense of loyalty
and use state power to enhance their self-interests. The growing attention of the theme
of corruption within Pakistan must therefore be seen primarily as a sign of
emancipation rather than an increase of immoral behavior among state officials. The
practices now increasingly labelled as corruption are not new. What is new, is the
growing sense of indignation about these practices within Pakistani society.
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